A Great Gift Idea

Two of Mountain Made’s most popular authors, Celia H. Miles and Nancy Dillingham, are co-editors and contributors of a new anthology by 50 women writers entitled It’s All Relative: Tales from the Tree – celebrating the lives of women and their connections with their families. Visit us on the web or come on down to the Mountain Made Art Gallery

“The Writers’ Workshop is a community treasure that deserves to be nurturedand supported“ – John Le Carre

Only your tax-deductible donation will make these worthy goals possible! A donation of $75 or more includes a year’s membership, which entitles you to discounts on all workshops and contests. To donate or to join The Writers’ Workshop, please click on register. As always, any amount would be greatly appreciated! Continue reading

Katherine Soniat’s sixth collection of poetry—A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge—is recently out from Dream Horse Press. The Swing Girl, published by Louisiana State University Press, was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the Poetry Council of North Carolina. A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize. These poems are from a new ms., in progress, The Secret Where. Her work has appeared recently in Women’s Review of Books, Citron, Hotel Amerika and Crazyhorse, among others. She teaches in the Great Smokies Writers Program at UNC-Asheville.

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Katherine Soniat Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand

In a way, these poems feel to me like sitting on the beach while the tide comes in: Each time I sit down to look at them, I end up reading and rereading until I realize I’m immersed in their waves. One thing that gets me about these poems is that I get more out of them each time I read them, including another layer of emotion. I understand this to be a testament to the restraint you’ve used in your work – you’ve subtly packed enormous substance into these poems. Because I am this affected as a reader, I wonder about the genesis of these poems. What prompted these poems and the manuscript they’re a part of? Continue reading

For ninety years, the University of North Carolina Press has earned national and international recognition for quality books and the thoughtful way they are published. A fundamental commitment to publishing excellence defines UNC Press, made possible by the generous support of individual and institutional donors who created its endowment.

In the early 1100s, a young girl named Grace is found in the forest. She is injured from running and running from something or someone who have terrified her. She is rescued by Nobleman Tristam and soldiers. Grace can’t speak, doesn’t remember how she came to be staked by her arms and legs in the forest, doesn’t remember her name…Tristam, takes her to the castle to be cared for and healed by the kindly maidservants who are adept at healing with herbal remedies and potions, wisdom, and love….

This is an intriguing and thoughtful novel placed in an intriguing backdrop of daily castle life, frightening forests, trust and deception, about love and loss, forgiveness and redemption, and the triumph of soul and spirit, of good over evil…

She is a retired University professor with 30 years experience teaching writing. Her editing experience includes books, scripts and poetry. She believes that the creative act of writing involving your imagination can be transformational, and change who we are and how we experience life. Many of her former students work professionally in television and film, writing, producing and directing. She is an avid reader.

VIDA was founded in August 2009 to address the need for female writers of literature to engage in conversations regarding the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current culture.

VIDA seeks to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities. Click for more information

Welcome to The Writer’s Almanac Bookshelf, where you’ll find highlighted interviews of poets heard on the show.

Your new collection of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, and your latest volume of poems, The Beauty, both came out earlier this year. Were you working on these books simultaneously? Does writing about poetry affect the writing of the poems themselves?

Thinking about poems — how they work, what they do, and why we need what they alone can do — is a lifelong pleasure for me. It brings a kind of intimate knowledge that can’t help but influence how a person then writes. Attention alters what it touches. But for me as a poet, this happens only in subterranean and indirect ways. Continue reading

A magazine editor is a person who enjoys bringing new writing to the world in a publication that will be seen, read, appreciated, and talked about.

This is the first fact anyone submitting to a magazine should understand. There may be two editors, or five, or a rotating group of a dozen student-editors on a board, but for purposes of this essay, let’s consider one who, if not totally in charge, has a large say in what goes on. This editor is committed to the magazine, to it reaching a readership, to its identity and survival.

Holly Iglesias was the only North Carolina writer to be awarded a prestigious Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts during the NEA’s last round of poetry awards. She is the author of three poetry collections: “Fruta Bomba” (Q Ave Press, 2012), “Angles of Approach” (White Pine Press, 2010), and “Souvenirs of a Shrunken World” (Kore Press, 2008). Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals, and she has received fellowship grants from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Edward Albee Foundation. Iglesias is a lecturer in the Master of Liberal Arts program at UNC Asheville. Continue reading

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Catherine Reid – Fiction

Catherine Reid is the author of Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst (Houghton Mifflin), a work of creative nonfiction. Her essays, stories and poems have appeared in such journals as Massachusetts Review, Green Mountains Review and the Bellevue Literary Review. She studied fiction writing at Florida State University, where she was a Kingsbury Writing Fellow, and then settled on nonfiction as the genre that demanded the most honesty. She has edited two anthologies, served on the editorial board for a literary journal, and ghostwritten a book on a well-known costume jeweler. Her current interests are in environmental writing and in prose in which style matters as much as content. Continue reading

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Katherine Soniat – Poetry

Katherine Soniat’s sixth collection of poetry—A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge—is recently out from Dream Horse Press. The Swing Girl, published by Louisiana State University Press, was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the Poetry Council of North Carolina. A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize. These poems are from a new ms., in progress, The Secret Where. Her work has appeared recently in Women’s Review of Books, Citron, Hotel Amerika and Crazyhorse, among others. She teaches in the Great Smokies Writers Program at UNC-Asheville. Continue reading

Writing Changes You…

Your voice is unique. No one has your imagination or your creativity. Writing is a way of sharing with others … your visions and dreams … and opening doorways for them to explore new possibilities…to know themselves in new ways. And this happens through the grace of you giving of yourself. You can learn to reach into your creativity … triggering your imagination to paint with words, to touch people, to move people, to inspire people.

Through writing, you are discovering who you are, as you allow the words and images, the feelings and thoughts, to flow from unfamiliar places… on to the page. You can surprise yourself. What you have to say matters more than you expect. You have value, more than you know.

Your imagination can bring those little black symbols on the page … alive … by moving you to tears of joy, or terrifying you, or uplifting you and inspiring you… making you gasp, or laugh out loud.

Writing can be a transcendent experience, when you write for yourself … when you let your familiar expectations go. You can be moved and even changed, by your own feelings and imagination … arriving at new and often surprising, perspectives, regardless of whether you publish or sell your work.

Your imagination is one of your greatest gifts. It can help you create meaning, with the power of words. Open to your imagination and to the mystery of who you are. Let your innocence open you to new possibilities within a new moment. From here, let yourself wonder, without having to know where you are going. Then create something, as if out of the blue. Imagination. It’s fun. It can make your heart sing.

If you want what you write to reflect your most creative and imaginative self … if you want to participate in a world of giving and receiving … if you want to lift beyond who you know yourself to be … contact me at 828-683-9331 or alixjamieson@gmail.com. I am available for editing, as well as private sessions for individuals and small groups.

I have thirty years experience in teaching creative writing for television and film scriptwriting, at the University level in California … as well as in editing books, poetry, short stories, fiction for children, and autobiographies.

History, poetry, and children’s literature inspired by the Great Smoky Mountains will be featured in “Books to Take Backpacking,” presented by the Friends of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Historian Margaret Brown, poet Thomas Rain Crowe, and children’s author Ann Clayton will read from their works at 3 p.m.Sunday, April 15, at Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café, 55 Haywood St in downtown Asheville. This “Writers at Home” event will encourage and inspire stewardship of the Great Smoky Mountains, and is free and open to the public.

Nonsexist-language pioneer Kate Swift, 87, died early Saturday morning after a brief encounter with abdominal cancer. Her generous legacy to the world includes her revolutionary influence on our language as well as her productive activism (she helped effect Connecticut’s marriage equality act, protect prochoice legislation, promote progressive candidates, protest the war on Iraq, and conserve the environment).

Publisher comments regarding Angles of Approach: It’s unusual to call a book of poetry a ‘page turner, ‘ but this collection, with the knocking and jostling of words that mark the peculiar rhythm and appeal of the prose poem, is just that. Iglesias has an uncanny ability to capture whole sweeps of history in a few lines, while her eye and ear for the quotidian result in the characters pulling us from one remarkable incident to another as if they had physically taken us by the elbow, whispering urgently.–Marie Harris Holly Iglesias is the author of Souvenirs of a Shrunken World and a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry.

Black Mountain College has attained near-myth status for the prominent roles it played in modern art, in the Beat poetry movement, and as a groundbreaking experiment in sociology. From its inception in 1933 until its closing in 1955, the college was populated by nonconformists and free thinkers … click here